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Continuous Research Report: Trends to Watch in 2023

Continuous Research Report: Trends to Watch in 2023

How product teams are informing decision-making through continuous discovery and research

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With support from experts at

A look at the research industry

User insights are the driver for innovation. The best product organizations today are the ones that learn as they build, putting customer needs at the forefront of product development to deliver constant value and react effectively to changes in the market.

To better understand how product teams learn, we surveyed more than 600 designers, product managers, and researchers. What we found is that more and more product teams see the value of research as a powerful tool to inform decision-making at each stage of the product life cycle. Research as a discipline is becoming better established, but there are still challenges to conducting more frequent, better research.

At the end of the report, we identify three trends that will continue to shape the research industry moving forward, and we look at how Atlassian—a customer-driven product organization—adopts a continuous research mindset. We hope this report will inspire new thinking on how we can best empower entire product teams to continuously learn from customers and innovate with them.

Author

Jonathan Widawski

Co-founder & CEO at Maze

About this report

We surveyed over 600 product professionals to find out how they conduct research to inform their decision-making. The majority of respondents who weighed in are designers (42%), followed by product managers (27%) and researchers (26%). Most of our audience works at SMBs and middle-market companies with 51-200 (26%) and 201-1000 employees (28%). Read more about the study methodology.

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The Atlassian Way: Research is a marathon, not a sprint

Caitlin McCurrie headshot

Written by

Caitlin McCurrie

Research Lead at Atlassian

Atlassian has a world-class research team, with nearly 100 researchers and a wide diversity of perspectives and backgrounds–from anthropologists to psychologists to survey experts and more. Even with such a large and ever-growing team, there are not enough researchers to address the many questions from the organization across our product development cycles. To extend the power of our research team, we collaborate with our cross-functional colleagues to conduct research as a team and empower Atlassians to conduct their own research when they might not have a research partner yet.

Despite such diverse backgrounds engaging in research, we’re consistent in how we orient our research process to the lifecycle of a product. Atlassian research is aligned with the Atlassian playbook for creating products or services: The Atlassian Way.

The Atlassian Way has four stages: Wonder, Explore, Make, and Impact. Across these stages, we continuously collect insights using different methods to keep the customer at the center of our decision-making across the development journey and build confidence that we are on track to deliver a quality experience.

Wonder

Insights here are critical to defining the problem space. Without a clear understanding of the customer needs or pains, you risk investing significant development time and resources into building a product that doesn’t deliver value. Typical research activities include semi-structured interviews, observational studies, and surveys.

Wonder

Wonder

Explore

Research in this phase helps ensure that you create solutions that actually address your customer’s challenges. Conducting research, such as concept or usability testing, during your exploratory phase maximizes the likelihood you find the best solution that offers utility for your customers.

Explore

Explore

Make

It's important to assess the utility and ease of use of your final solutions since these are strong predictors of usage and adoption. Explore activities like usability studies or a diary study of your beta participants. Also, try to triangulate qualitative data with behavioral analytics to strengthen the quality of your insights.

Make

Make

Optimize

Collecting insights at this stage will help you understand the “why” behind the success (or failure) of your newly released product. Atlassian researchers work closely with their analyst peers to offer context to better understand behavioral analytics and identify improvements for later iterations.

Optimize

Optimize

Inspired to implement The Atlassian Way in your research practice? Whether you’re implementing your first research practice or optimizing the existing process, we have two key messages for you from our experience of maturing research at Atlassian.

Research is a team sport.

Product managers, designers, and product marketers all participate in research at Atlassian. While the researcher brings best practices, each team member brings their unique perspective to our insights and what they mean for the product we’re developing. We encourage all crafts to lead their studies. While this can feel intimidating for those new to research, not all studies need not be lengthy and complicated. For example, for Atlassians-who-do-research, we recommend exploring open comment fields of a CSAT survey, creating a poll in a community space, or walking through paper prototypes with five customers.

Research is a marathon, not a sprint.

Research isn’t confined to one stage of the product development process, such as discovery or validation after shipping, but is a marathon that extends across the entire product life cycle. Rather than thinking of individual studies that generate customer insights, we create continuous learning cycles that contribute to an ever-growing knowledge base of who our customers are and how we best serve their needs. The Atlassian Way ensures that we continuously deliver insights that allow teams to course-correct as they build.

Methodology and audience insights

The report survey was created using Maze and distributed between June 21 and July 31, 2022. During that period, we shared the survey on our Maze website, social media accounts, in our monthly newsletter, and via email to our contacts, who also shared the survey with their professional networks and in research and product communities.

We partnered with ADPList, who promoted the survey in their global community of over 8000 mentors and learners. We collected responses from 603 product professionals with experience conducting research (researchers, designers, and product managers). Other 564 respondents took the survey but did not qualify based on our criteria.

Which of the following most accurately describes your role?

Which of the following most accurately describes your role?

How many people work at your company?

How many people are in your product org?

Next Steps

1

Continuous research is here to stay

Product teams understand the value of research and the importance of building products with their customers. Yet, the biggest obstacle keeping companies from running more research is a lack of time. The challenge is no longer getting buy-in but how to conduct research more often and throughout the product life cycle.

Continuous research is here to stay

1

Continuous research is here to stay

2

Democratizing research will help scale the impact of research

The demand for customer insights has outpaced the capacity of most research teams. As a result, companies are starting to amplify the impact of research by empowering more teams across the organization to access, collect, and consume research insights to make more informed decisions.

Democratizing research will help scale the impact of research

2

Democratizing research will help scale the impact of research

3

Conducting research early and often improves decision-making

Product teams report that research positively impacts product adoption, activation, and customer satisfaction and helps make more effective decisions, especially when conducted weekly or daily. We think research findings will continue to be a key factor in informing decision-making at each stage of the product life cycle.

Conducting research early and often improves decision-making

3

Conducting research early and often improves decision-making

About Maze

Maze is the user research platform that makes products work for people by making user insights available at the speed of product development. Built for ease of use, Maze allows designers, product managers, and researchers to collect and share user insights when needed most, putting them at the center of every decision.

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2023 Continuous Research Trends Report